It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.
Interpretation
The quote humorously reflects the confidence and perceived omniscience of adolescence.
Arthur C. Clarke's quote highlights the often exaggerated self-assurance and belief in one's knowledge that comes with being seventeen. It points out the irony of youth, suggesting that while teenagers may feel invincible and all-knowing, true wisdom often comes with age and experience.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the idealism of youth.
Nowhere in space will we rest our eyes upon the familiar shapes of trees and plants, or any of the animals that share our world. Whatsoever life we meet will be as strange and alien as the nightmare creatures of the ocean abyss, or of the insect empire whose horrors are normally hidden from us by their microscopic scale.
As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.
It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value.
The best measure of a man's honesty isn't his income tax return. It's the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.
My favorite definition of an intellectual: 'Someone who has been educated beyond his/her intelligence'.
We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well. And seeing with the brain is often called imagination.
When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
There is an invisible strength within us; when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger.
Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.
Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.
Stars burn clear all night till dawn. Do that yourself, and a spring will rise in the dark with water your deepest thirst is for.
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